Category Archives: Risk assessment

If you are in this industry you must be aware of the San Bruno failure in September 2010. The immediate causes are now well known. Equally interesting is recent analysis of the underlying organisational failures in both the pipeline owner … Continue reading →

The most prolific commenter on this blog is Chris Hughes of OSD who is passionate about good pipeline engineering. Chris and I communicate regularly off-line as well, and he has offered the following for me to reproduce here. I’ll add … Continue reading →

I am surprised too often by people who think that they can do an AS 2885 risk assessment by using some risk matrix other than that published in the Standard. AS 2885.1 makes quite clear that risk evaluation must be … Continue reading →

I’ve written before about penetration resistance and the B-factor as specified by AS 2885.1 Appendix M, but that post didn’t distinguish between design of a new pipeline and review of an existing line. From time to time I see confusion in … Continue reading →

Further to my last post where I made some assertions about the frequency of some failure consequences, there is particularly useful information available from European incident data. EGIG is the European Gas pipeline Incident Group and as the name suggests … Continue reading →

In the AS 2885 risk matrix the five frequency levels are: Frequent – expected to occur once per year or more Occasional – may occur occasionally in the life of the pipeline Unlikely – unlikely to occur within the life … Continue reading →

I have previously made passing mention of historical Australian pipeline incident rates as an aid to estimating which frequency category to select from the risk matrix when doing a risk evaluation. It seems worth briefly updating that in the light … Continue reading →